The CIA's operational directorate, in other words that's their covert operations, para-military, dirty tricks — call it whatever you want — has for at least 40 years that we can document paid for a significant amount of its work through the sales of heroin and cocaine. — Guerrilla News Network's Interview with Christopher Simpson

ClA-supported Mujahedeen rebels [who in 2001 were part of the "Northern Alliance" fighting the Taleban which became the core of the new Afghani government following the U.S. attack on Afghanistan in late 2001] engaged heavily in drug trafficking while fighting against the Soviet-supported government and its plans to reform the very backward Afghan society. The Agency's principal client was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the leading druglords and a leading heroin refiner. CIA-supplied trucks and mules, which had carried arms into Afghanistan, were used to transport opium to laboratories along the Afghan/Pakistan border. The output provided up to one half of the heroin used annually in the United States and three-quarters of that used in Western Europe. U.S. officials admitted in 1990 that they had failed to investigate or take action against the drug operation because of a desire not to offend their Pakistani and Afghan allies. — The Real Drug Lords
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, as is by now well-known by anyone who has cared to be informed, has long been deeply involved in the international trafficking of the addictive drugs heroin and (since the early 1980s, if not earlier) cocaine, the enormous profits from which have financed, and continue to finance, both U.S. covert operations and the U.S. military (via payments to Pentagon contractors).

The main reason why this is not more widely known is that the main players in the U.S. media have always worked to protect the Agency and to keep the American public in the dark as to the nature of its activities (as documented in great detail in Carl Bernstein's article in the October 20, 1977, issue of Rolling Stone: "The CIA and the Media: How America's Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up"). The information you will find on this web page, and the web pages it links to, is not considered by the editors of the New York Times and other mainstream U.S. "news" media as proper for the public to know.

By the end of the 1980's it was calculated that the illegal use of drugs in the United States now netted its controllers over $110 billion a year. — Modern Times, p.782.

Covert government by defense contractor means corrupt wars of conquest, government by dope dealer. When the world's traditional inebriative herbs become illegal commodities, they become worth as much as precious metal, precious metal that can be farmed. ... Illegal drugs, solely because of the artificial value given them by Prohibition, have become the basis of military power anywhere they can be grown and delivered in quantity. ... To this day American defense contractors are the biggest drug-money launderers in the world.— Drug War: Covert Money, Power and Policy, p.318.
Most of this page concerns the CIA's involvement in drug trafficking, but we should first note that this is only one part of its activities, the means by which it finances its operations in addition to the billions of dollars it gets from U.S. taxpayers courtesy of the U.S. federal government (the exact amount, of course, being kept secret from U.S. taxpayers). In addition to being the principal source of U.S. propaganda for domestic and foreign consumption the CIA is the covert operations division of the U.S. goverment and as such has engaged in many terrorist activities. In fact the CIA is a terrorist organization, funded by the profits of international drug smuggling.

Kennedy's intended change in Vietnam policy — his plan to unilaterally withdraw from the imbroglio — infuriated not only the CIA but elements in the Pentagon and their allies in the military-industrial-complex. By this time, of course, the Lansky Syndicate had already set-up international heroin running from Southeast Asia through the CIA-linked Corsican Mafia in the Mediterranean. The joint Lansky-CIA operations in the international drug racket were a lucrative venture that thrived as a consequence of deep U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia as a cover for drug smuggling activities. — Michael Collins Piper, The Final Judgment, quoted at Vietnam, the CIA's Illegal Drug Trafficking, and JFK's Assassination
From the days of the Vietnam War the CIA has been at the forefront of heroin trafficking. When the Reagan administration needed to finance its war against Nicaragua the CIA applied what it had learned in Vietnam to importing vast quantities of cocaine (sometimes 20 tons at a time) from Latin America, selling it to the Mafia, and using the profits to finance its "covert activities", activities so contrary to America's professed values that they must be concealed at all costs from the American people.

I ask Dennis [Dayle, former head of DEA's Centac], "If the following statement were made to American citizens would you agree with it? 'Enormously powerful criminal organizations are controlling many countries, and to a certain degree controlling the world, and controlling our lives. Your own [U.S.] government to some extent supports them, and is concealing this fact from you.'"
"I know that to be true. That is not conjecture. Experience, over the better part of my adult life, tells me that that is so. And there is a great deal of persuasive evidence. But I also believe that what you just said can be dealt with very effectively. You can contain drug trafficking by the immobilization of the few cartels who truly control it. There must be conscious decisions, based on fact rather than propaganda, at the grass-roots level of the global community, that the global drug-trafficking situation should not be tolerated." — The Underground Empire, p.1161.

Because (some) drugs are illegal, there are huge profits to be made in supplying them to those who want or need them. Legalization would eliminate the enormous profits now being made and would provide a social context in which education concerning the use of drugs was not only respectable but also a social obligation. In the meantime the "War on Drugs" works only to keep (some) drugs illegal and to maintain the profits of the traffickers.

Much information about the CIA is already available (see Audiotapes, Videos, CD-ROMs, Books and Articles), but the mainstream media has deliberately ignored this information, and as others have said, if it's not on TV then for many Americans it isn't real. But this is real, and it affects everyone.